It all starts with the improbable description of what Jenni perceives from the amniotic pocket of her mother, before her birth. Everything ends with a renaissance, at the edge of his 16 years: that which made him give up a evil destiny for a future which was going to prove to be full of promise, leading it to notoriety as a poet and novelist. The between two composes the body of this book.
It took him thirty years of therapy, but also a long introspection to write it. She immersed herself in her diary, but also in the thousands of pages of her childhood file placed. The retrospective is vertiginous and the memories disproportionate. The path was difficult to transcribe. The typed manuscript, who describes the meanders, remained locked in a case. He came out twenty years after being started.
Jenni lived in so many host families and homes. She has changed so many times by name. It was adopted twice. She never had her say. This time, she speaks and never lets go, trying to deconstruct the mechanisms of these dysfunctions which almost destroyed it.
Stuck in the madness of the two previous generations, she was born from a mother who has left her psychosis, the time for childbirth, before returning once the childbirth accomplished. Very quickly, the long series of car trips begins to lead it to its new destination. Ding-dong, steps are heard, the door opens. Will she stay a week, a month, a year? She will never know it, as the car trips will follow one another.
Violence, she knew it. One of its adoption mothers was exasperated every day. She did not like to be bored when she was in front of the TV/in the kitchen/in bed that she crossed a room or did anything. So she was hitting. Children need to be struck. This is how they grow up, she was convinced. She humiliated him, convinced that she is in her right.
Until the day Jenni empties the pharmacy cabinet by swallowing everything she can eat. Hospitalization. Stomach washing. Change of reception place. The garbage bags where all his belongings are piled up is still out, as always. They await it with each transfer.
The rapes, the fugues, the street life, the drug addiction? No one seeks to understand it. Neither host families, social workers, teachers, police, nor the parents of his friends … No one will have ever questioned it, understood.
Fortunately there is reading. When she immerses herself in books, she manages to exteriorize the unbearable ugliness of life. Fortunately, that there is poetry. It is in secret that she keeps writing it. She hides her everywhere, where no one will find her. This is his refuge, his reinsurance, his backup so as not to sin completely.
Fortunately there are fairy tales. She learned the good manners from which she benefited so little. She met beautiful, kind and hopeful people there. Generous and good adults who do not act just for the lure of gain. Too bad they are so rare in real life.
Fortunately there are his intimate newspapers. She hides them under her mattress or under the dresser. Words are the only companions who follow it everywhere. They allow her to refocus when everything seems to burst around her.
And then, at 16, she left child protection for a foster home for battered women. She breaks the bridges with her past. She leaves a life in which she did not want to grow. She will go up the slope and try to repair so many injuries.
This is a hard story, a trying testimony, an uncompromising description. Let us have the courage to face it, to better understand, to better welcome, to better protect. Ultimate confidence: ” If the anger accumulated during my whole life and following what happened to me really came out, she would kill someone »(P.268). To meditate for all those who seek to decode the violence of certain children placed.
This article is part of the “open book” section
He is signed Jacques Trémittin
Do not miss his site “Tremsite”: https://tremintin.com/joomla/
Photo: Author Jenny Fagan © Louise Carrasco Editions Métailié